semperama:

things you said with too many miles between us

“I’ve gotta tell you, man, this dry spell is killing me.”

Zach snorts into the phone as he opens the door to his apartment and steps inside, flicking on the lights. “Well, this conversation just took a hard left turn.”

“Sorry. I just figured you’d understand. I feel like I’ve been filming for a year straight—”

“That’s because you pretty much have, Chris. I seriously hope you’re going to take a break after Wonder Woman.” Zach shifts the phone to his other ear so he can toss his empty coffee cup in the trash can and start rummaging around in the fridge for ingredients for dinner. “And by the way, you are allowed to fuck people while you’re working, you know. Just preferably not your co-stars.”

“I know, I know,” Chris sighs in his ear. “But after a fourteen-hour day of filming, the last thing I want to do is go out to a bar to cruise for chicks.”

Zach chuckles as he plops an armful of veggies down on the counter next to the cutting board. “Cruise for chicks? Christ. No wonder you can’t get laid. Hold on, I’m putting you on speaker. Gotta multitask.”

He presses the speakerphone button and sets his phone down. This has become something of a ritual for them since they finished shooting Trek. The phone calls don’t happen daily, as if by some mutual agreement, but they never seem to go more than three days. Now that Chris is in London, it’s been harder to talk because of the time difference, but they just tend to play phone tag until they get ahold of each other. It seems important somehow. The days they don’t manage to catch each other, Zach feels jittery and weird.

“I’m just saying, Zach.” Chris’s voice fills the kitchen now. It’s soothing. “It’s hard to meet people.”

Zach rolls his eyes at nothing while he busies himself with chopping up a pepper. “How can you be such an introvert and such a slut at the same time? I don’t get it.”

“Those two things are not mutually exclusive,” Chris says indignantly. “I just want to get off. Is that so much to ask?”

“Well, I’d offer my services, but…” Zach means it to be a joke, and he expects a laugh from the other end of the line, but a couple seconds of weird silence pass by instead. He pauses in his chopping and listens hard, trying to tell if the call dropped.

But then. “Honestly, I’d probably take you up on it.”

It takes a few seconds for that to sink in, but once it does, Zach sputters and whirls around to gape at his phone as if Chris could actually see him. “What?”

“I’ve just, uh…I’ve actually been missing being with men lately. It’s hard when I’m working so much, and I have to be careful. It’s…it’s been a long time, and I just…”

“So that’s it, then? It’s been a long time, so you’d even settle for me?”

“That’s not what I meant.” Chris sounds oddly solemn, and Zach has to snatch up the phone and take him off speaker, like that will somehow stop this conversation from feeling so weird.

“What did you mean?”

“I meant…” Chris pauses to sigh, and Zach grips the counter to brace for what comes next. “I meant that I think about you a lot. And I miss you. I meant that I really wish you were here, for a lot of reasons. I meant that if you ever wanted me that way…all you’d have to do is ask.”

“Oh,” Zach says dumbly. He’s stares at the wall, at a spot on the backsplash where the grout is a little dirty. He should clean that, he thinks. Maybe he should clean it now. Maybe that will stop his head from exploding. “You, uh…we couldn’t have had this conversation sometime when you weren’t about a million miles away?”

Chris lets out a nervous chuckle. “You can add ‘coward’ to your lexicon of my negative traits.”

“Lexicon,” Zach repeats. “Good word.”

“Zach, come on—”

“No, I…I don’t know what you want me to say, Chris. I’m kind of blindsided here.”

There are shuffling sounds on the other end of the line, and Zach wishes more than anything that he could see Chris right now. He has a feeling that if he could see him, he would know exactly what he wants. As a disembodied voice on the phone, Chris is just his friend, his best friend, one of the most constant things in his life. Maybe if he were here in the flesh and Zach could see him and touch him and smell him and—

“Look, let’s just…let’s say that it’s on the table. Me. I’m on the table. I won’t say anything else about it, and next time we see each other I’ll just act normally, but if you want something, all you’ve gotta do is…is let me know, okay?”

Zach takes a deep breath, then lets it out in a rush. “Okay,” he says shakily. “Okay.”

“Okay. Well. I’m going to go to bed before I can start to really freak out about how much I just fucked up—”

“You didn’t fuck—”

“—and I’ll talk to you later, okay? I’ll call you this weekend.”

Zach doesn’t think he’s lying. Chris might be a self-confessed coward, but he’s not a dick, and he’s not going to let their friendship fall by the wayside for something that’s not Zach’s fault—Zach knows that. In fact, Chris might be the only person in the world, aside from his brother, that Zach can’t imagine ever abandoning him. It’s comforting, but it’s also scary.

“Chris?” he says, before Chris can hang up and leave him with lonely static.

“Yeah?”

“I miss you too.”